3. 3 Essentials of a Literate
Environment
• Getting to Know Literacy Learners
• Selecting Texts
• Literacy Instruction (Interactive
Perspective, Critical Perspective, and
Response Perspective)
4. Getting to Know Literacy
Learners
• Teachers must motivate students to want to read
and have fun while doing it.
• In order to create a literate environment,
teachers must get to know the children in their
classrooms (Laureate Education, 2010a).
• Teachers can begin to understand more about
their students through interacting with families,
talking to students, and interest inventories.
5. Getting to Know Literacy
Learners
• Assessing both cognitive
and metacognitive aspects
is crucial in teaching
students because for
students to become
effective life-long learners
they must have both the
skill and the will to read
(Johns & Lenski, 1994).
Activities for Getting to
Know Literacy Learners
• Me Stew
• Literacy Autobiographies
• Interest Surveys
• Developmental Reading
Assessment
• Sight Word Assessment
7. Selecting Text
The following are to be
considered when
selecting texts:
• Genre
• Dimensions of
Difficulty
• Text Sources
• Size of Print
• Text Length
A very useful tool to
use when selecting a
text is the LITERARY
MATRIX. This tool
helps teachers to
balance the text and
difficulty of the text.
9. Literacy Perspectives
• All three perspectives are key components
in creating a literate envrionment
(Laureate Environment, 2009).
• Once teachers know their students, they
need to determine what they are going to
do with those texts, and for those
students to help them become literate
learners (Laureate Education, 2009).
10. Interactive Perspective
• Teaching students how to read and become
strategic processors and thinkers (Laureate
Education, 2010).
• Use schema as a strategy for comprehension.
• Students learn to choose most effective strategy
when reading, use different strategies for
different types of text, and make predictions,
visualize, and make sense of text.
11. Critical Perspective
• Teaching students to critically examine
text. To look at text from a different
perspective (Laureate Education, 2009).
• Being able to have a discussion with others
about the different meanings a text might
have and teaching the potentially
critically-literate learner how to think
flexibly about it.
12. Response Perspective
• This perspective gives students the
opportunity to experience and
respond to text (Laureate Education,
2009).
• A student is who responsive to a book
can be transformed by its message
(Laureate Education, 2009).
13. Comprehension is the goal of reading; it’s
the reason people read. Students must
understand what they’re reading to learn
from the experience, they must make
sense of the words in text to maintain
interest; and they must enjoy reading to
become life long readers (Tompkins, 2010)
14. References
• Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010a).
Analyzing and selecting text [Webcast].
• Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010b).
Getting to know your students [Webcast].
• Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2010c).
Perspectives on literacy.[Webcast].
• Tompkins, G.E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A
balanced approach (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
